Overwhelming evidence demonstrates that office design can impact the health, wellbeing and productivity of its occupants. But designing a great place to work is not all about having a space with quirky design features, flexible working areas or places to relax.
It’s long been thought that plants act as a natural air purifier, absorbing harmful chemicals in our homes and other buildings. However, a new report suggests that if we want to breathe in cleaner air, it might not be as simple as filling your home with some extra greenery.
Supporting people that live with dementia is one of the greatest health and social care challenges of modern times. Today, around 850,000 people in the UK have dementia, a figure expected to reach at least a million by 2025 and 2 million by 2051. In fact, 225,000 people will be diagnosed with dementia this year – that’s one person every three minutes.
If you’ve spent any time away from a conventional office in the last decade and then returned, you will have noticed a big difference. Here we look at how our living and working spaces are crossing over and what this means for design.
We’ve known for some time that noise pollution is a real and measurable problem, one with equally real and measurable impact on our wellbeing. But new research points towards the damage noise pollution has on nature – reopening the debate around its effect on humans.
It’s normal for all of us to be exposed to noise that annoys us from time-to-time. The neighbour whose TV is always on full blast, the work colleague who eats their lunch too loudly, or the builders down the road drilling from the crack of dawn.
